Winter Birds (7 page)

Papa enjoyed stories like that, and you smiled for him in all the right places. But he seemed many miles distant when he spoke, and after a while so did all the nurses and doctors, so did the little black boy's crying, so did Mama. You only wanted to gaze ahead at the white wall
opposite you, seeing only the whiteness, hearing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling only the stillness of your body every place but the torn vein where the blood oozed out. You couldn't have said it in words, but you understood then that your blood had always wanted to be free of your body, that it wanted to leave you flat and empty on this bed. No one else knew about it. They watched your moist, sticky mouth as if the thing that unfolded from it was something they had never heard of before. Only Mama understood. She knew you might be leaving. But she never cried, not once, and neither did you.

The veins in your hands closed up. The doctor moved the needle. You watched the swift scooping motion of the curved steel tip into the pale blue snake under your skin. When the nurse left you alone you touched the mound of flesh the needle raised. Mama stayed beside you day after day. Papa brought changes of clothes for her, told her stories about Amy and Allen and Duck, at home being taken care of by Mama's sister Delia. Aunt Delia sent you comic books and a tin jet with an engine that sparked and crackled whenever the landing wheels turned. Mama didn't like the loud noise it made. You set it on the table next to the bed, Mama saying, “You have to be quiet in a hospital.”

You slept and woke again. Mama bent over you, parting your lips, an ugly look on her face. Behind her the first doctor talked to other, older doctors. Papa stood by the window smoking a cigarette. Mama spoke earnestly in his ear, touching the piece of arm.

You dreamed of dark rivers lined with mossy trees, of dense undergrowth alive with small animals: monkeys with orange fur and curled tails, parrots with wings that burst like rainbow bombs in flight, deer with soft tongues and eyes like flower petals. You swam in the river, splashing water backward with your hands or upward with your feet. You dove underwater to watch the slow fish swim by, or else you swam close to the bank in the darkness beneath the arches of weeds, where the water moccasins nested.

Or else you dreamed of clouds. You dreamed you were no longer a child, you were something other, something you assigned no name but only imagined: light-boned, colored like ivory, skimming the clouds on broad white-feathered wings that flashed in the clear air. The dream had no form or story, only the rhythm, the thick beat of your wings in the solid air. Your shadow skimmed the clouds. Sometimes you flew alone drinking mouthfuls of wind, reaching forward with your wings and scooping back, the whole sky empty around you—but sometimes there were others, sometimes thousands of you, above, below, from side to side, lost in mountainous hangs of cloud, wings beating up and down, endless pulse …

Once during this dream you heard Papa's voice, and then Mama's answering: “I found us a new house already,” Papa said. “You can quit pouting around like I brought the whole goddamn world to an end.”

“I'm not pouting,” Mama said. “I've got other things
on my mind.”

“He had it coming. No telling how he would have treated you this summer.”

“Don't act like a hero,” Mama said. “You did it. I don't care why. All I know is you couldn't have picked a better time to get thrown in jail, with your son lying in the hospital.”

“That fat son of a bitch had it coming to him. He can shove his house and his whole goddamn farm right up his own ass.”

“You're lucky he didn't press charges on you.”

Papa said, in a new tone, “Delia wants to stay with you here one night.”

“What will you do then? Who will you fight with that night?”

“Well if you're going to get smart, Miss Priss, maybe I'll start with that doctor friend of yours, the one you're always talking about like he's Jesus.”

“He ain't nothing to me but a doctor, and if you don't know that by now I'm sorry for you.”

“Maybe he don't mean nothing but you sure do blush when I talk about him.”

“It's what I ought to expect from you. You never quit. It ain't enough you leave me here all day to watch this youngun bleed, and him laying here so weak he can't say a word. No, you got to make me feel nasty about the only person that talks to me the whole day …”

You listened, you heard everything, you knew the words meant something to them but none of it meant anything
to you. Nothing reached you in the dream, where you had become the other, flying with broad wings over continents of pure white clouds, not one stain of red. You listened to them talk as if they were a dream, and the dream of the other was real, the land of red lakes bordered with silver trees, lines of slim ladies and gentlemen walking along the banks, filling the sky with the soft fogs of their voices. The dream changed and you became new things, things you never remembered afterward.

You remember a long car ride and then a new hospital with forest green walls, in a city whose name you would always remember. Mars Hill. The doctors here spoke to you often. They called you by name. “How are you this morning, Danny? Is that tongue still leaking, Danny? Don't you worry, Danny boy, we'll have it stopped soon, there's nothing to worry about.”

You smiled back at them, feeling the stickiness. Their faces made you want to laugh, even Mama's. The blood kept falling, no matter what they said or did, and you were sure that even here, even in this new hospital, nothing would change. All day long you felt the blood running down your chin, away into the air, a smoke that vanished in front of you.

You slept and woke and finally did not wake, easing in and out of grayness. Sometimes you saw the shapes of faces, no longer caring to see more, feeling their presence as one feels the brush of a fly's legs. You stared into the wall behind Papa's head, over Mama's shoulder, into a place neither of them saw: a river, a gate, a long stairway;
you were following someone, following music, following the bare back of a man whose face you might recognize if you could catch him and make him turn around. You hurried after him because you wanted him to give you something, you didn't know what it would be.

Mama said, “Danny if you drink this cocola your mouth will taste better.”

Papa said, “If you get better I'll buy you a little guitar.”

Mama said, “Don't be such a quiet little boy, talk to me.”

Papa said, “He don't care, he's just going to lay there.”

Mama said, “Darken the blinds again, so he can sleep.”

Papa said, “It seems like if he's going to—if there's nothing we can do about it—it seems like we're going to pay a lot of money for him to lay here like this.”

Mama said, “He can't help it.”

“I know, you say it all the time, it's his blood, it's his goddamn blood.”

“Don't talk like that in front of him. You don't know how it makes him feel.”

“All I know is everything in this room has to be paid for by somebody, and I got a feeling it's going to be me.”

“He's a little boy, he can't help the money.”

After a while Papa said, “Well, at least we ain't going to take any more chances. We been lucky since Danny, we got two good sons. We won't have any more.”

Mama's voice took on a nervous sound. “You think
we're going to stop because you say so?”

“One of your fancy doctor friends can tell us what to do. There's pills you can take to keep from having babies.”

“That's fine if there's not one already started,” Mama said slowly. “But what if it's already too late?”

Right in front of their eyes the man's bare back retreated, so close he might have slid his hand right through the solid look of hate Papa gave Mama when he understood what she was telling him. They only saw each other and the wound in your mouth. You knew then you might have followed the man forever, might finally have caught him except, now and then, for the look in your Mama's eyes.

Mama told you, years later, about the night Papa came back to the hospital after he learned he was going to be a father again. Your bleeding had slowed. The doctors hoped a clot would form soon. Papa drove all the way to Mars Hill muttering about the baby and drinking beer. In the hospital he let Mama know everything he had thought about her since he saw her last, and picked a fight with her in front of the nurses. When he began to shout in earnest one nurse ran for doctors and orderlies. But before anyone came he lunged at Mama with a paring knife he had carried in his pocket all the way from home. Mama locked herself in the bathroom before he could reach her. Papa beat at the door with his piece of arm shouting not that he wanted to kill her but that he wanted her to come out and pay some mind to him, look at him, see him for a while.

The doctors told Mama they could put him in jail if she wanted them to, if she would press charges. She told them no. If he were in jail, who would feed her family?

You slept through all this, a deep sleep that made Mama more afraid than before. She stood at the side of the bed all night, counting your breaths.

In the morning you woke to see them both at the window, Mama facing Papa, Papa standing with arm and piece of arm clumsily folded. Past his head you could see clouds, far above the world. The dream of the other had disappeared. Your chin was dry. You could feel the large and rubbery blood clot on your tongue.

“You should have waited to tell me till after all this was over, I couldn't take any more surprises. I'm about out of my mind.”

“I already waited two months to tell you because I was afraid what you might do.”

Then you called, “Mama,” softly, your voice strangely thickened by the clot.

They turned and saw you, and both of them smiled. Mama pushed Papa's arm out of the way and came to you.

“See,” she said, “I told you it would be all right.”

In a moment Papa came too, and laid his heavy hand on top of your stomach.

A week later when the clot disappeared you could eat soft foods again, and the doctors let you go home. Mama packed your clothes into a shopping bag saying Papa was bringing Aunt Delia's car to drive you home. Not to the old house but to a new one. She acted as if the news should
surprise you, and you, for your part, were never quite sure why it didn't. She told you the story in the car while you waited for Papa to sign the papers about the hospital bill. Papa broke Mr. Rejenkins jaw in a fight, Mama said, and spent the night in jail. The next day Mr. Rejenkins evicted the family from the house. The new house was nicer, Mama said, in a neat, clean yard, closer to town than the last house. That wasn't the end of the news, either. In a little while, Mama said, you were going to have a new baby sister or brother, and wouldn't that be fun?

IN THE
next house, the sixth one, you lived for two years. You named that house the Light House because from a distance it looked like an old white lighthouse rising out of a sea of trees. The center of the house stood three stories tall, narrow and sheer like a tower. Mama hated this house from the beginning, despite what she told you that day in the car. There were so many stairs to climb she ran like a mountain goat from morning to night. She swore it was the stairs that brought on the early birth of your youngest brother Grove, who lay three weeks in a hospital incubator before the doctors thought him strong enough to come home. Papa fretted every day about the money wasted as peevishly as if Grove had checked himself into an expensive hotel. Mama lay in bed staring at the ceiling and keeping quiet. She laid Grove's birth certificate on the dresser next to her where she could see it all the time.

When Grove came home he lay in the crib with his eyes closed all day long, a small, dark-haired toy. Soon
enough he proved to be a bleeder like you. One day a razor blade accidentally tumbled off the dresser into his playpen, and he dragged his soft arm across it. The pale flesh oozed blood hour after hour, more than you would have thought such a small body could contain. Mama and Papa drove him to the hospital in Mars Hill. Once there he bled for weeks.

He almost died, Mama said. A few months later he almost died again, of a bruise on the side from a simple fall in his crib. He passed blood into his diapers and his side swelled stiff as a melon. A few months later he almost died again when for no reason, after no fall, his knee swelled to twice its normal size, bending his leg back double.

At each accident Mama and Papa drove him to Mars Hill, where the doctors hovered over him with their needles and their bags of plasma.

At home, Mama walked from room to room, listless, watching Grove sleep, touching him carefully and turning away from the rest of you, studying the road beyond the window glass.

Papa came home drunk nearly every day. He sat in his chair by the same window where Mama watched the road. By then he had managed to buy a used television for the family, and he watched the blue images drift across the screen till he felt like sleeping. For a long time after Grove was born, Papa rested when he drank. He would answer any question Mama asked him in a flat voice, looking at her but showing no sign of feeling. If not addressed, he
kept perfectly silent.

One night he brought a bottle into the house and dared Mama to get drunk with him.

Mama turned from the bottle to Grove and back to the bottle. It was summer and hot. Her face was beaded with sweat from climbing stairs. She was afraid he would fight with her if she said no. The bottle had a crow on the label, a grinning black crow sitting on the kitchen table, the naked light bulb suspended over it on a thick black cord. Mama watched the bottle for a long time, and you watched her. At last she poured the liquor into a jelly glass.

They fought again that night, the first real argument since the night in the Blood House, a fight like a storm passing through the house. To you it seemed uglier than any before it, because Papa hadn't yelled this way in such a long time, and because Mama was drunk too, and seemed like him.